The Combover (2 page)

It didn't take long for my baldness to appear. Straight after my military service, at a drab barracks in Udine, I could actually see my hair beginning to fall out. I felt a sense of liberation when I had finished washing my hair and hundreds of puny, hapless hairs ended up in the plug hole. I took one of them, examined it against the light (color, root, length), then another and yet another; afterwards I rinsed the shower tray and let the water carry them off down the drain. I was reassured by the thought that these hairs were starting a new life far away from me, in the city drains. Nevertheless, despite my swift and premature hair loss, I had to wait two years before my mother, looking down at me from above, said one day: "Arduino, are you losing a little hair by any chance?"

"That's quite likely, Mum," I confirmed.

"Then let the doctor have a look at you, or go straight to the dermatologist—he'll know what to do. There'll be some special creams or lotions I expect. You know how much your father suffered."

She didn't understand, she couldn't understand, that this was exactly what I wanted, to cover what nature was taking away, to decorate the void, to emphasize it by the very act of covering it, not to replace what I had lost (let's be clear—a combover isn't simply hair, nor is it some sort of surrogate, like a wig or a transplant). We bald people want to show off our baldness, the humble condition to which we are reduced—we want to reconstruct on our scalps the landscape which all men, sooner or later, will see snatched from them as the years pass.

From my earliest childhood my ideal model for a combover had not been that of my father, the classic or standard model, achieved by allowing one of the two sidelocks to grow inordinately long over the temples, so as to cover the entire bald surface of the head until it reached the other side. "That was what the Salesian brothers used to do," my father used to say. "Don't you remember Don Teodoro, who taught you the catechism? It was what post office employees used to do as well."

Nor had my favorite model been my grandfather's, the double parting, which was more sophisticated and time-consuming—letting both sidelocks grow, weaving them together, to form a sort of Mohican crest in the middle of the scalp, and securing the construction with a strong lacquer. No, neither of these: my model was the imperial hairstyle of Julius Caesar, made for men of importance—letting the hair grow at the back of the scalp and then training it forward for the necessary amount of time, like ivy climbing down to the forehead, or like a silk rug. Neither my father nor my grandfather, alas, had the chance to appreciate this hairstyle of mine. My father would have been against it—not with any great vehemence, but he'd have been against it all the same. He of course admired Bobby Charlton (that was why he always supported Manchester United), who styled his hair with a blend of tea and shoe polish and combed it over from one side to the other. When Bobby Charlton was awarded the Ballon d'Or in 1966, my father celebrated by honking his car horn. He drove his brand new Fiat 850
coupé
out of the garage and sat there banging on the horn for a good ten minutes. No one knew why, and I don't think anyone ever asked him for an explanation. One neighbor went out onto his balcony and shouted: "Stop that blasted noise,
Avvocato
!" My father then, with no more ado, drove the car back into the garage and that was the end of his celebration.

I, on the other hand, was a fan of Adriano Celentano. I loved his songs and his forward combing, that untidy curtain of hair over his forehead, a bit like a fringe, as if a gust of wind had caught it from behind. It was a combover that made no concessions to any slavish hairstyling, though it was still a combover in all respects. At that time we used to sing and dance, and even a dead loss like Teresa, the town beauty who would eventually become my wife, could dance and feel up to date with the times, even if she preferred to live in her imaginary past, listening to Mina, to Giuni Russo's
Un'estate al mare
, to Mia Martini and Kate Bush, and reading
The House of the Spirits
or watching and re-watching
On Golden Pond
with Jane Fonda and so forth. I, on the other hand, while not being a frequent visitor to libraries, was passionate about library studies (a discipline that I enjoyed immensely because I regarded it as a branch of fantasy literature, along with pedagogy and theology). It was order that interested me, going from one bookshelf to another following a classification criterion that was always arbitrary and misleading. "Why do you find a book in one place rather than another?" I used to wonder. This was the point, to know how to find your way around the labyrinth of labels; and this was my study for years, until I stopped concerning myself with classification in favor of a more academic approach and began studying bibliographic data exchange formats. As soon as I began to devote myself to this particular area of research, acquiring a certain expertise, my life underwent, one might say, a radical change. I began suffering from insomnia, and my forehead began to broaden out so that a bald patch of modest dimensions opened out. Moreover, I married Teresa, and this marked the beginning of my long ordeal of muscular contractures. I was often left paralyzed until Teresa decided to give me a painkilling injection.

"And where do I have to do it?" she would ask. "You know I hate blood."

"I've told you over and again. Choose a buttock, draw an imaginary cross, and stick the point of the needle in where the lines meet. That's where you do it. Surely you can manage that! There won't be any blood if you do it as you're supposed to." But it was no use, she was hopeless, though she could prepare a syringe without leaving a single bubble in it.

We lived in a first floor apartment close to the main square in Recanati. Below it was a take-away shop that gave out a terrible stink of grilled meat. The owner was a man who smoked a cigar that he always kept in one corner of his mouth. He roasted pork by the shovelful, and as time passed, he began to develop pig-like features, as if the spirit of the pig had left its body just as he was putting its flesh on the grill and had gone and attached itself to the first bastard it happened to come across. One day I went into the take-away to ask him if he could do something to reduce the smell, as I couldn't open the window without breathing in a stink of putrefaction. He said no—I had to get used to the smell, he said.

There was an old couple in the apartment next door who argued and threw dishes at each other. In the evening, when I got tired of studying bibliographic data exchange formats, I sat by the window listening to their arguments. I began writing a story all about them, but then asked myself: "Why am I wasting my time on two fucked-up old people?" What was so extraordinary about them? And then, the shouting . . . the insults . . . their "stupid old sod," or "why don't you just drop dead." In short, I got bored writing about them and gave up after a couple of weeks, still stuck on page one. The man in the take-away also told my neighbor that it was just a matter of getting used to the smell of the meat, but one day, tired of his wife and of the stink, he took a fire extinguisher into the shop and sprayed it over the grill ("I'll have you . . . getting used to it! . . . I'll have you . . ." he said), and then he lifted up the extinguisher and smashed it over the take-away owner's head. When the take-away owner got back from hospital with his head bandaged up, the old man told him: "If I smell the stink of grilled meat again, I'll flay you alive and stick you on it. Understand, you pig?"

All this pandemonium that had been tormenting me reached its culmination one day when I went to a barber in Bari, the city where I had just started work as a specialist researcher at the university, studying—as I have already mentioned—bibliographic data exchange formats. The barber was in Via Napoli, a noisy area, full of traffic. It was one of those no-frills gentleman's barber shops with two chairs, two mirrors, the usual table of magazines to flick through—the atmosphere of a hospital. I sat down in one of the chairs (both were empty) and exchanged an occasional comment with the barber: the weather, the traffic, and life in Bari. But then the barber, almost apologizing for the interruption, asked: "The usual?"

"Yes, the usual," I said, though I can't think why I said "yes, the usual" since this was the first time I'd been there.

I had always had difficulty, since I was a child, explaining to the barber how I wanted my hair. There was a time when I used to go round with a photo of my father in my pocket, and when the barber asked how I wanted my hair I'd pull out the photo and say: "Like this, I want it just like this," even though later on I preferred the imperial hairstyle of Julius Caesar.

They used to look at me, holding back a smile.

"You haven't arrived there yet, my boy."

"But I will sooner or later!"

Instead of blank walls, the barbers ought to have photos of hair styles, so that you can choose according to taste. "Like this one," a customer might say, or: "On top like this and the sides like that one there," and so forth.

The barber in Bari was a portly man and his head was already showing a few signs of baldness: perhaps it had been stopped in time but he'd certainly lost a few hairs—in fact, quite a few. He moved around me like a hippopotamus. I didn't mind entrusting my head to him—the way that things were going, my hair was in need of some periodical care, and so the barber, I thought, would most likely have a potential customer in me. But on the other hand, I never trusted people with bodies that didn't fit what they did, and yet the Bari barber—while seemingly unsuited to wielding scissors (he had more the hands of tomato picker or a tire repairer than a barber)—seemed to be a man who was confident and precise. In short, while he was working away with his scissors, perhaps as a result of the anti-epileptic drugs I was taking at the time, I nodded off for a moment in the chair. Two minutes at most, no more (I used to keep a close watch when they cut my hair, and if something wasn't right I had no hesitation in taking the scissor-wielder's hand—"Leave this up here, but you can cut there," I would say). I may even have started dreaming as I sat there in the chair—I don't know what, but I think I was dreaming something. When I came to, I had the impression that the reflection in the large mirror in front of me was someone else. One of the Toldini's, for example. Costantino Toldini, to be exact—a man my age, a financial consultant who had a shorn head and ran around the town wearing earphones and a pair of leotards that showed off his package (and he wasn't in the least embarrassed at being seen like this). The haircut had been one of the fastest I'd ever had. When I roused myself he was already brushing the hair from the back of my neck and behind my ears with a soft white brush.

"But you've shorn me!" I said.

"See how fine you look," said the barber, and to convince me that it really did look good, he stuck a mirror behind my head so that my shorn head was reflected back into the large mirror.

"It's not possible, how could you? I asked for a light trim."

The barber replied as calmly as could be: "Come on, summer's here . . . You don't want to look like those old folk who wander about with their last remnants of hair, do you?"

I regarded that "come on," said with a pat on the back, as a real impertinence. Then he carried on with his justification: "You're still young. Married?"

"What's that got to do with it? All I wanted was a light trim, I didn't want to end up as yet another Toldini."

The barber smiled, though he had no idea what I was talking about.

"Take my advice, you look much younger like this . . ."

"I haven't the slightest interest in looking younger, and anyway, that's your opinion, and quite frankly, I couldn't care less about your opinions."

"Next time I'll give you a light trim and no more, if that's what you prefer."

"Next time! You were supposed to get it right this time . . . this is too much." I tried to make him understand, without going into detail, that he'd left me nothing to comb over.

"I'm sorry."

"It's easy to say sorry . . . I knew I should have stuck with my usual barber."

"Where?"

"Who?"

"Your barber."

"In Recanati."

"Nice place, Recanati. I went there a few years ago."

Over the large mirror was a calendar with a naked woman rolling in the sand and a picture of two bald men heaving boulders; below it was a passage from the
Inferno
:

Those whose pates boast no hairy canopies
Are clerks—yea, popes and cardinals, in whom
Covetousness hath made its masterpiece.

"You see?" said the barber as I was reading these lines. "Those with the shaved heads are priests, whose only toil in life had been to accumulate wealth."

"I'm not interested," I said. I couldn't have cared less about Dante at that moment—I was looking at my combover, which was now a pile of clippings on the floor.

Leaving that place with my head shaved was an unforgettable experience: the air around my ears, my head exposed, the sun on my naked scalp—in short, I was no longer myself or, if I was, I was not what I had been before. I could have died of shame. My grandfather, an extremely respectable man, considered to be a man of reason, would have wasted no time in reporting that Bari barber. I stood there at first, in the doorway. The barber meanwhile was shaking the cape and holding it out for the next customer who had just arrived.

"Take my advice, you look much younger like that," he repeated, holding out his scissors, ready to commit more carnage. He was certainly a man of clear ideas, I had to admit.

"You've done a proper fine job of him, Kociss!" said the next customer, pointing to me and already settled in the chair.

I summoned all my strength, took a deep breath, and went off along the road with my head bowed. I didn't go to the university that day. I telephoned the secretary's office to say I was postponing my lesson.

"I'm not feeling well this morning," I told one of the secretaries, "I'm going straight home and then to see my doctor."